Kevin Rudd for United Nations Secretary General – Please

by James Doogue

20 July 2016

 

Kevin Rudd wants the Australian Government to back his run for United Nations Secretary General in 2017. The current Secretary General, South Korean Ban Ki Moon has been in the role since 2007. So I guess it is a 10 year stint. That is an awful long time. I’m sure Rudd can stuff the UN in much shorter time.

Ban Ki Moon’s legacy will be to have done absolutely nothing about:

• The expanding aggression of Russia.
• The complete disregard of international law by China.
• The rise of ISIS.
• The ongoing genocide by Muslim factions, of Muslim factions and non Muslims, in North Africa.
• The complete disregard of human rights in many UN countries but particularly in the Middle East and Africa, Russia and China including many countries serving on the UN Human Rights commission.

Instead of using the UN to bring about change in countries where parts of the population are persecuted, he has preferred to preach to stable, free and democratic countries about taking more of the now 60 million displaced people in the world – which number growth considerably under Ban Ki Moon’s watch.

While there has been negligible change in global temperature since 2007, and the Arctic and Greenland ice has stabilised while Antarctic ice extent reached record levels, Ban Ki Moon continued with climate alarmism, spreading concern about a potential temperature increase which might place us in the range of past climate optimums such as the Medieval Warm Period, The Roman Warm Period and the Minoan Warm Period.

The earth has benefited from increased greening due to CO2 fertilisation turning dessert into grassland, and grassland into woodland, Yet Ban Ki Moon has tried to label CO2 a pollutant!
Ban Ki Moon continues to claim that every flood, drought, typhoon, cyclone, hurricane and other severe weather event is evidence of man made climate change, yet even the UN IPCC agree there has been no increase in the frequency or intensity of such events in recent decades, while atmospheric CO2 emissions have continued increasing.

Ban Ki Moon has pushed for the reduction in the use of cheap and reliable fossil fuels for power, heating and cooking and transport, and instead pushed for expensive, inefficient and unreliable solar and wind power. This is already hurting the poor in Europe with a new ‘energy poverty’ – people who cannot pay their power bills.

So I would not be sad to see the back of Ban Ki Moon. But I wasn’t surprised by his lack of actual achievement at great cost to the world.

The UN is an expensive, dysfunctional, overly bureaucratic institution which achieves little of benefit or significance.

The more that continues, the sooner the UN will crumble or restructure. After all, where is the democratic nature of a body which gives effective veto votes to China, France, Russia, United Kingdom, and United States?

Where is the democracy in that, or the democracy in giving a country with a population of 10,000 (Nauru) the same value vote as a country with a population of 1.3 billion (India)? There is no sense!

So the sooner the UN falls apart, or is forced to restructure by the member countries, the better.

That is why I am supporting Kevin Rudd’s bid to be the next UN Secretary General. Lets face it: he almost destroyed the Australian Labor Party, and set back Australia a decade with his wasteful stimulus and other spending. So hopefully he can take the UN’s current dysfunction and multiply it by at least a factor of 10.

Citizens will grow to dislike him, like those who worked closest with him always do, and will demand the changes at the UN that I have been calling for over the years.

On hearing that Kevin Rudd was running for the UN Secretary General position, former NSW premier Kristina Keneally described Kevin Rudd as a ‘psychopathic narcissist’, suggesting her dog would make a better candidate for the UN secretary-general.

Keneally has a lot of company in that assessment of Rudd:

A GIANT ego. A narcissist. A micro-manager. An impulsive control freak. A haphazard and secretive decision maker.

This is not what Kevin Rudd’s political enemies think of him. It’s what many of his colleagues do. Whether openly or whispered in hushed tones to journalists, this is the picture once painted by his fellow ministers, MPs, public servants and diplomatic associates.

Caucus members, it soon became clear, had never liked him. A psychopath, one backbencher called him. A narcissist, others said. He was a micro-manager and his office, by all accounts, was dysfunctional. “This crypto-fascist made no effort to build a base in the party,” a power-broker told ABC TV’s Chris Uhlmann.

Wayne Swan summed up cabinet feeling in a statement: “For the sake of the labour movement, the government and the Australians which it represents, we have refrained from criticism to date. However, for too long, Kevin Rudd has been putting his own self-interest ahead of the interests of the broader labour movement and the country as a whole, and that needs to stop.”

Peter Garrett has become the latest politician to pick at the scab of politics past, labelling Kevin Rudd a “megalomaniac” and saying the former Prime Minister put the safety of Australia in jeopardy in a lengthy interview with Channel 7’s Sunday Night program.

But there is another explanation for the Rudd dysfunction: self-gratification taken to an extreme, an obsession with always being the centre of attention — like a spoiled child — and an addiction to being in the media spotlight. In our therapeutic age, perhaps we could call this pattern of behavior megalomaniac or sociopathic, but perhaps these words go too far in pretending medical precision. To describe the same phenomenon, the ancient Greeks coined the word hubris. Mark Latham:

The people who knew him best hated him most and the people who never met him thought he was alright.

The Labor caucus knew him inside out. I don’t want to exaggerate, but truthfully he was a bastard, wasn’t he?

He was such a vicious, egotistic vicious person in the parliamentary history. He destabilised every leader under whom he served. He notoriously sabotaged Labor’s 2010 election campaign with those vengeful leaks.”

Clearly Keneally was expressing an opinion about Rudd shared by many who knew him best. However I formed the same opinion about Rudd without ever having to know him personally. If you ask me, it was bleeding obvious.

So let us all urge our Government to back Kevin Rudd in his run for UN Secretary General in the hopes that he will take his modus operandi with him to help bring about the collapse or the reform of the UN as quickly as possible.